An Evaluation of Learners’ Satisfaction toward Mobile Learning MING-PUU CHEN 1 & JUNG-CHUAN YEN 2 1 Graduate Institute of Information and Computer Education National Taiwan Normal University 162, Sec.1, Ho-Ping E. Road, Da-An District, Taipei City 2 Department of Multimedia Design, Tak-Ming College 56, Sec.1, Huan-Shan Rd., Nei-Hu District, Taipei TAIWAN 1 mpchen@ntnu.edu.tw ; 2 lcyan@takming.edu.tw Abstract: - This study explored learners’ satisfaction toward a mobile learning system designed to enhance novices’ reflective thinking and problem-solving. Instructional multimedia were provided via mobile devices to facilitate novices’ learning of the Fedora system. Learners’ reflective thinking was enhanced by responding to the reflection prompts and summarizing what they had learned from the instructional multimedia. The results showed that learners satisfied with the employed mobile learning as measured in terms of willingness-to-use, ease-of-use, and helpfulness toward the employed mobile learning. It was concluded that a pedagogically well-designed mobile learning system not only possesses the potentiality in facilitating learning but also satisfies the learners. Key-Words: - mobile learning, multimedia learning, reflective thinking 1 Introduction According to the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula [1], the goal of the computing curricula is not only to encourage students to strengthen their communication and technical skills but also to become an effectively problem-solver and active independent learner. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to shift our emphasis from teaching to facilitating authentic learning and raising the concepts of ownership and reflection on learning. Recently, the ubiquitous computing and mobile technologies provide much scope for designing innovative learning experiences that can take place in a variety of outdoor and indoor settings [2]. The utilization of mobile devices for learning has increased learners’ motivation, promoted interactive learning, facilitated cognitive skills development, and supported constructivist educational activities through collaborative groups [3][4]. However, Patten, Sanchez and Tangney [5] contended that the use of technology for learning must go beyond the technology determinist viewpoint of claiming that mobile instructional tools inevitably will have a role to play in the way people learn. Instead, the development and use of mobile devices should suit the pedagogical underpinning in order to facilitate learning in a pedagogically sensible manner. This study examined the use of a wireless personal digital assistant and instructional multimedia in a web-based asynchronous learning environment to facilitate reflective thinking during the processes of solving IT problems. Learners’ satisfaction toward the employed mobile learning was examined and several emerging issues concerning the design and utilization of mobile learning were discussed. 2 Literature 2.1 Mobile devices bringing about broader ways of learning Digital learning system was always coupled with novel arrangements of instructional-embedded objects, providing alternative forms of interactions through familiar actions with unfamiliar effects, and then encouraging learners to reflect and think beyond the present of their actions to higher levels of abstraction [6]. The recent development of mobile devices tends to merge the portability and connectivity features together to allow broader ways and opportunities for real life learning. The portability gives mobile devices the potentiality for pervasive use in students’ works, such as notes and photos taking, homework-completing, data-collecting, problem-solving, and writing down reflective thinking real time, that may facilitate learning far more widely and deeply than the desktop Proceedings of the 6th WSEAS International Conference on Applied Computer Science, Hangzhou, China, April 15-17, 2007 382